My last entry was a year and four months ago. I've read Joad Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, where she recounts the days of the year following her husband's sudden death. It is a beautiful memoir and tribute to her love of her husband, and a record of the the aching loneliness of her grief. I have felt the ache each day since Ron's death; little triggers cause me to feel the sadness of the loss.
Our days that final year were pretty routine. He played golf and I played housewife, a role I loved. We were still raw from COVID and noted the favorite restaurants that succumbed and were grateful that the pandemic did not take anyone in our community of retirees. In mid-summer, when we learned of Ron's terminal cancer, our days were solitary; we were silently preparing for the inevitable. We spent afternoons napping in each other's arms and sometimes weeping together. I tried to make any recipe that Ron could keep down. He had no appetite and felt nauseous all the time. One day he told me he craved a red popsicle and I rushed out to find one for him. By the time I returned he had lost the craving and after a few bites he gave up. I hid my feelings of desperation at the prospect of losing him, my friend, my lover, protector, and husband. We wrote his obituary together and he choose the photograph he wanted to go in the paper. His financial advisors came to the house and, by his bedside, they discussed and signed papers.
By the end of September Ron was too weak to walk. Our last intimacy was wheeling him into the shower and helping him onto a chair draped in towels. I got into the shower and tenderly washed his ravaged body and washed his hair. Then, after toweling him dry, I wheeled him back to the bed. He was exhausted from the shower and seemed to sleep, as I massaged him with the rose cream we had bought in Varna; I helped him into clean pajamas. The following night we checked into hospice. I slept next to him as hurricane Ian raged around us. We were in that safe, quiet place. Two days later I woke up beside him and the room was too silent. He was gone.
In her grief, Didion wrote, “I notice that I have lost the skills for ordinary social encounters." This past year I have felt the same. Unlike Didion I haven't really grieved. I have been strong and stoic for my family, but alone at night I am overwhelmed with sadness. The emptiness is there and I haven't been able to see through it to write or to reflect. Thus, the long hiatus in this blog. Perhaps now I am ready to begin again.
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